ICT – Page 52 – John McLear

Interactive Educational Volcano Games

Posted on April 20, 2010April 20, 2010 by primaryt

I have submitted some volcano games to Primary Games Arena. Click here to see a list of Flash Volcano Games that can be used in Primary School lessons and home. I was hoping I could have a widget wrote today that would include all the games inline on this blog post but I keep getting distracted by people wanting to use my laptop to check their flights are still flying.

The games are here.

Earth day – a call to photoshoppers for help!

Posted on April 20, 2010July 26, 2012 by primaryt

: Image via Wikipedia

UPDATE: This has now been done by Stuart Ridout – My thanks goes to him and Shelly Black-Plock for helping.

Hey all, because I’m stuck in Morocco I need help making a new background to go onto Safe Search tomorrow. Usually I use photoshop and design a new background.

Here is a link to some example backgrounds I use at current and in the past:
Winter 800×600
Spring 1140×713
Spring 950×713

The idea for the backgound is to encourage teachers to go paperless for the day for Earth day.

If you have photoshop and can help please create one image at 1140×713 and one at 800×600, the image should not have any content behind the search “buttons” as seen on Safe Search.

New TTS Classroom microphone for kids to use

Posted on April 1, 2010April 1, 2010 by primaryt

This new TTS microphone for classroom use has the usual handy USB port on the bottom and easy record/playback of last clip. I did find using it a bit fiddly and some of the buttons feel super tacky. Great choice for KS2! Not sure on availability/price. Want to see other options? Check out my top 5 microphones for classroom use.

Ramesys and Capita sitting in a tree…

Posted on March 29, 2010October 30, 2011 by primaryt

Capita have purchased Ramesys. To summarize: “Bloated company buys failing IT company that has won a lot of government contracts. Public services are now even more dependant on a bloated company.”

Capita have a long track record of increasing prices for services so if you use Ramesys for IT services expect the price to go up within a 24 month period, especially if you are a BSF school.

Capita now own even more of the education market. You may recall that Capita(and Serco) are being investigated for monopolizing the MIS market and were subsequently slammed by Becta. (although officially the investigation isn’t just Capita and Serco).

Here is the funny thing… Ramesys speculated so much on potential growth over the BSF and other government contracts that they began bleeding money (2.9m last year, £5m the year before) even though the revenue was a tiny £34m. Most of this money was bled due to BSF bids which as everyone in Education knows cost more to write than you get in initial profit but give you the potential for long term profit. Ramesys do now have a number of BSF contracts however they are still massively dwarfed by RM’s dominance in this market place. Surely if the BSF contacts are making UK companies stretch so hard to win them then the idea of such a difficult contract bidding process is more damaging than it is rewarding? BSF schools have not been without problems.

It only leaves one question… Who will Serco buy?

EPSON 450Wi projector “don’t impress me much”..

Posted on March 29, 2010September 2, 2012 by primaryt

Of course I’m at the risk of sounding like Shania Twain but with so much hype and such high expectations for this device I was a bit dissapointed. I found the pen to be too heavy for all day use, it is about 4x the weight of a Promethean pen and at £150 for a replacement pen my eyes did water a little..

When using the board close up the reflected glare from a normal dry wipe board is so extreme that is hurt my head after only a few minutes. The device I used the Projector on was very slow to pick up the driver and in some instances it had to be started manually, I’m not sure if this is an installation error or an error with the software that is shipped with the device.

This projector could save the average classroom over £1000 plus the maintenance cost of the board so it could be a much more cost effective solution. I also found that the projector I was using was incredibly blury in the bottom left corner, the rest of the projected image was fine. See picture below:

*UPDATE: On the projector their is a manual focus just by the lens. This fixes the blurring – This is not well documented by Epson.